With the project “Deciphering mechanisms of pancreatic β-cell homeostasis and regeneration”, three teams from HMGU, LMU and TUM are working together in order to clarify the paths and mechanisms of β cell homeostasis and regeneration using pig models and to provide novel pharmacological targets for β-cell regenerative therapy.

This project is a collaboration between Prof. Heiko Lickert, Director of the Institute of Diabetes and Regeneration Research at Helmholtz Zentrum München, Prof. Eckhard Wolf, Director of the Institute of Molecular Animal Breeding and Biotechnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Prof. Fabian Theis, Professor at the Technische Universität München and Director of the Institute of Computational Biology at Helmholtz Zentrum München.

Based on strong expertise in islet biology and stem cell research (Lickert), pig genetic engineering and physiology (Wolf) and bioinformatics (Theis), within the next three years, the researchers aim to understand β-cell homeostasis and regeneration in a large animal model with a closer metabolism to human. This ambitious goal will be achieved by using advanced single-cell multimodal omics tools, which allow the profiling of transcriptome signatures with spatial positions (spatial transcriptomics) and, simultaneously, the analysis of epigenomes, transcriptomes and epitopes (CITE-seq coupled with scATAC-seq) of β, ductal and acinar cells in the pancreas.